“Ashanti” May Be the Ga Pronunciation for “Asante” Further Corrupted by European Slave Traders

There was once a “Cultural Revolution” in Ghana in the late 1970s and early 1980s that was launched, characteristically faux-socialist fashion, by a junior ranked junta leader who could not have known much about Ghanaian Culture, at least the type of Ghanaian Culture lived and practiced by the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizenry. That junta leader, of course, was none other than the late half-Scottish waif by the name of Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings; and the junta machinery over which he presided was called the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). Earlier on, Flt-Lt. Rawlings had headed a short-lived bloody junta called the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) that had literally slaughtered nearly every key military operative of the previous Ignatius Kutu Acheampong- and the Frederick William Kwasi Akuffo-led tandem juntas of the Supreme Military Council (SMC- I & II), previously known as the Acheampong-led National Redemption Council (NRC). Gen. Akuffo would take over after a palace coup had caused the removal of the former Lt-Col. I K Acheampong.

The Provisional National Defense Council, as I have had several occasions to point out or highlight, was absolutely nothing new. It was actually the name of a welfare organization constituted by some labor-union oriented members of the Ghana Armed Forces to cater to the economic needs of its membership. At any rate, the theme and subject of the present column regards the traditionally standard or proper pronunciation of the globally celebrated Eighteenth Century Akan Kingdom in Ghana’s geopolitical heartland that was founded by the immortalized King Osei-Tutu, I, who would fall to his death during the course of a militarily and politically expansionist war with the Akyem people who, once upon a time, rescued their then less powerful and even far less fortunate Asante royal kinsmen and clanswomen from Denkyira suzerainty and effective enslavement. Today, the part of postcolonial Ghana predominantly inhabited by the Asante people has been designated, clearly wrongfully, at least phonetically speaking, as the “Ashanti” Region.

In a quite morally and epistemically enlightening and refreshing Facebook post by renowned Ghanaian investigative journalist Mr. Manasseh Azure Awuni, squarely based on yet another Facebook page posted by Mr. Sonnie Badu, the Britain-based Ghanaian gospel music maestro, Mr. Awuni aptly draws both public attention and the attention of Mr. Badu, the original Facebook “postman,” to the epistemically incontrovertible fact that there absolutely exists no such ethnic polity or group in present-day Ghana that goes by the name or nominal designation of “Ashanti,” and that it was the European slave traders and colonialists whose apparent Afrocentric phonetical disability culminated in the corruption of the traditional name of “Asante” into “Ashanti,” which today has also officially come to mis-designate the Asante Region as “Ashanti” Region, a phonetic and nominal anomaly than can be aptly attributed to the pathologically willful ignorance of the Western-trained and heavily influenced class of Ghana’s elites (See “There Is No Tribe In Ghana Called ‘Ashanti’ – Manasseh Schools Sonnie Badu” Ghanaweb.com 9/10/22).

My personal take on this “Ashanti” conundrum also brings up the issue of the very designation of any ethnic or subethnic polity or group in the country as a “Tribe,” an immitigably primitivistic anthropological concept used to politically differentiate “civilized” European people from the majority of the human species of the members of the Non-Aryan or Non-European people, which has long been proscribed by the global comity of the membership of the United Nations Organization (UN). You see, the ideological concept of “Tribe” refers to any group of humans at the most basic or rudimentary level of the human-development index or chain, designated by White-European-Supremacist anthropologists, for the most part, as “Primitive Peoples.” Now, what is quite interesting, to speak much less about the even more fascinating, here, is the fact that not all human polities or groups of nations can be aptly said to have reached the same level of development, by which it is often meant scientific and technological advancement. But even among the so-called Primitive Peoples, there is a clearly discernible pecking order that is almost strictly predicated on the degree of cultural and technological advancement.

In this sector of comparative cultural episteme and analysis, the Akan people of Ghana are often perceived to be a veritable “Civilization,” that is, a culture complex that is of a much more significantly higher level of philosophical or intellectual and technological development than all the other ethnic and cultural polities historically located within the geographical and the geopolitical confines of present-day Ghana. At any rate, what I equally want to highlight here, and I have done so at least a half-dozen times in the recent past, is the fact that there is an equally high and plausible possibility that the very word and ethnographical designation of “Ashanti,” as opposed to or differentiated from “Asante,” may very well have been passed on to the very first European visitors and/or tourists and explorers to the erstwhile Gold Coast, subsequently to be redesignated as the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate by British merchant pirates and colonial imperialists by the Ga-Adangbe inhabitants of the southeastern coastal enclaves of the country. Some quite juicy and meaningful food for thought here, I hope.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

November 5, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]